Fr. Leo, July 5th, 2020

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Fr. Leo

“You are not in the flesh;
on the contrary, you are in the spirit,
if only the Spirit of God dwells in you.” (Romans)


These words from our second reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, expresses a theme dear to Paul in what it means to live in God while we live in the flesh.  The first point we must be clear about here, is that Paul is not setting the “spirit” and the “flesh” in opposition to one another.  This is not possible since Jesus himself was both Spirit and flesh.


What is necessary in understanding Paul is that he is calling for a healthy union of Spirit and flesh.  In the end the flesh will die and we will continue on as spirit.  But for now, redemption is allowing the Spirit to bring our “flesh,” or better understood, our humanity to be the tabernacle of God.


For us there will always be a tension between our human life and our call to abandon ourselves to God.  It might be helpful to see our human life as the way we have adapted in our milieu to find happiness by fulfilling our need for security and love.  As children we learned ways to meet those needs.  We even learned how to manipulate others if we needed to.  The problem is that as adults, that no longer works, and we can become obsessed with our strong emotional “needs” that are enshrined in our false-ego-self and lose touch with the love with-in us: the God who is the ground of our existence and being.


Conversion is recognizing these exaggerated emotions and grounding ourselves in God.  This is how we come to live in the Spirit while in the body.  Rather than feeling separated from God and others we come to experience ourselves as one with God and others, indeed, with his whole creation.  This is what it means to live in the Spirit.  We come to that place where Paul’s words become ours, and we can say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”